Challenge
Museums and Monuments of Portugal (a state organisation) had a problem. How could they recruit new volunteers without being able to offer them a salary, bonuses or even meals? Without offering anything other than a ‘thank you very much’?
Volunteers are very useful to the Portuguese museums and monuments because they help preserve them - without costing the public purse any more money. Above all, they help to bring Portuguese heritage culture closer to the Portuguese.
But it's not easy to recruit new volunteers. Typically, volunteers in Portugal favour social areas (people in need, children, animals) or religious areas. The cultural sector has a harder time recruiting.
Work
Solution. We didn’t need eureka. We needed baby steps. Baby step one was to create an “esprit de corps”. Make volunteers feel that they belong to an organisation they can be proud of.
Nothing creates the perception of belonging better than a brand. Brands give protagonism to an organization. We needed a brand that would identify them as volunteers in Portugal's museums, monuments and palaces. A brand they could point to and say ‘I'm part of it’.
Name. It should be descriptive, so we know what it’s about: Voluntário Museus e Monumentos de Portugal (Volunteer Museums and Monuments of Portugal). But the name is huge, so we looked for an abbreviation – a symbol. A short sign that people could understand in an instant.
Symbol. A volunteer defines himself by belonging to an organisation because he wants to. That's why we created a capital V with an apostrophe, a punctuation mark that represents belonging to something. To show inclusivity, this capital V appears in several fonts, not just the font of the brand name.
Colour. Black and white wasn’t enough. We chose a tangerine colour to boost the will and pride of the volunteers.
Typography. For the brand name we chose an uppercase sans serif typeface, with a subtle simplification of the letter A. This name becomes a statement, boldly proclaiming the volunteer’s identity as part of something bigger.
